Institutional Knowledge

At the start of the term, we looked at portal traffic on the first day of the term, in this case spring 2008. It was a busy day, to say the least. Now that we have data for the entire term, what more do we know?

• The second day of school was the busiest day of the term for visits (not visitors, as define by Google Analytics), 32,915.
• Monday after spring break had the highest total visitors, 18,391.
• Saturday, March 15, the start of spring break was our least busy day for visits, 4,499.

Now, you might look at these numbers and say, “Pat, that’s exactly what we would expect to happen.” That is correct, but until you actually have the numbers, you don’t really know that your expectations of reality and reality itself match up. Now you do.

The numbers for the whole term look like this:

You might notice some abnormalities in our sparkline graphs. This is due to our introduction of tracking some popular “external links” during spring break. It will slightly distort our page view data for spring 2008, external links are tracked as views, but as long as we break our reporting into pre and post break segments we’ll be fine. Our visitor information remains consistent though.

The external link tracking is important in the portal so we know where people are going when they leave. Our portal strategy has never been to bring applications into the portal, just provide easy access. Before Google Analytics it was difficult for us to track that information. Now we track clicks to all major applications from the portal. That information should prove illuminating in the future.

Overall having Google Analytics in the portal is a big win for us. We’re still keeping all the raw log file information and doing our usual processing, but this wins hands down just for the amazing breadth of information we can look at now.